A Renaissance Reclaimed

Stefan Bauer is a lecturer in early modern world history at King's College London. He is a fellow and council member of the Royal Historical Society and has taught at the universities of York, Warwick and Royal Holloway as well as in Switzerland and Italy.Simon Ditchfield is professor of early modern history at the University of York, where he has taught for over thirty years. His research interests encompass religious history and the history of history writing. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the Accademia Ambrosiana, Milan.

• Introduction: A Renaissance Reclaimed: Burckhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance Reconsidered, STEFAN BAUER AND SIMON DITCHFIELDPrologue: The Making of a Text 1 A Renaissance from Scraps: The Material Evidence for a New Critical Edition of Burckhardt’s Book, MIKKEL MANGOLD 2 ‘A Centaur at the Edge of the Forest’: Jacob Burckhardt as Cultural Historian, MARTIN A. RUEHLPart 1: The State as a Work of Art 3 ‘The State as a Work of Art’: State and Politics in Burckhardt and in Italian Renaissance Political Thought, ROBERT BLACKPart 2: The Development of the Individual 4 The Performance of Identity in Renaissance Italy, VIRGINIA COX 5 Expressions of the Self in Burckhardt’s Renaissance, WIETSE DE BOERPart 3: The Revival of Antiquity 6 The Colours of Antiquity in Burckhardt’s Portrait of the Renaissance in Italy, BARBARA VON REIBNITZ 7 Burckhardt, Humanists, and the Remains of Antiquity, WILLIAM STENHOUSEPart 4: The Discovery of the World and of Man 8 What Is Left of the Renaissance? The Discovery of the World and of Man from a Cosmopolitan Perspective, JOAN-PAU RUBIÉS 9 Burckhardt’s (New) World and Ours: Rethinking the Renaissance in the Age of Global History, GIUSEPPE MARCOCCIPart 5: Society and Festivals 10 ‘A heightened moment in the life of the people’? Festivals in Their Social Context and Burckhardt’s Legacy to Modern Festival Research, HELEN WATANABE-O’KELLY FBAPart 6: Morality and Religion 11 Burckhardt’s Beliefs and Renaissance Religions, NICHOLAS TERPSTRA 12 Burckhardt, Religion, and the ‘Principle of Correction’: From Renaissance to Reformation, STEFAN BAUERAfterword, PETER BURKE FBA

One reason why Burckhardt can still be read out of sheer interest in his subject-matter is that he drew so much much of his material from primary sources -- chronicles, diaries, anecdotes, satires, comic novelle and so on. This was a humanistic and gentlemanly kind of scholarship, unlike the newfangled academic processing of archival documents; and it helped to inoculate his work against some kinds of obsolescence, since Vespasiano da Bisticci, Giorgio Vasari, Pietro Aretino and the rest can read just as freshly today as they did in 1860.